Replacing One Health Care Failure with Another

Yet ObamaCare largely failed in its primary goal—to create a better market for individual health insurance. The ObamaCare exchanges are performing much worse than expected when they were launched in 2014. And this has nothing to do with the Trump administration. Rather, the law failed because of its perverse construction.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2014 that there would be 25 million enrollees covered in the exchanges in 2019. The actual figure is about 10 million. People who don’t qualify for huge subsidies or who aren’t sick don’t find value from the products. Exchange enrollment has stabilized, but only because of the subsidies. The number of unsubsidized enrollees in the individual market dropped from 9.4 million to 5.2 million between 2015 and 2018.

HKO

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”- Thomas Sowell

My experience buying individual insurance for my wife, Debbie, reflects the incredible damage the ACA did to the individual market. By defying the relationship of health care to basic economics we passed a bill that defied basic economics- the outcome was very predictable. Another example of promising a benefit without paying for it; hiding the cost in a maze of cross subsidies, mandates, proxies and obscure regulations.

During the debate we heard of 46 million uninsured. Once elected Obama spoke of 30 million uninsured. (The magic of electing the right person I guess) The real number of chronically uninsured were between 10 and 12 million, ‘ironically’ much closer to the number who actually received benefits from the ACA.

Like any government program failure is never acknowledged. Single payer would be a bigger failure.